I Almost Failed my First Year of Medical School

Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimized by 2020!

I know we are safely(?) in 2021 now but indulge me this look back on what was without question, the hardest year of my life.

In fact, this blog post could be more accurately titled "The many, many times I actually really did fail my first year of medical school and the Lord somehow dragged me through it" but we'll get to that soon.

In January 2020, I arrived in Brisbane, Australia. Wildfires were sweeping the coast and I was getting ready to start my first year of medical school. Six months prior, I had accepted the offer to attend my top choice medical school. UQ-Ochsner gave me the unique opportunity to spend my first two years of medical school living abroad while still holding on to the promise of a 93% residency match rate, which was the only thing that held me back from applying to medical schools out of the country before.

The campus was gorgeous, my apartment was decorated, and I was anxiously awaiting the start of my first year of medical school! If I'm being honest, I was already battling the first signs of impostor syndrome but I shook them off and reminded myself that, although it took a couple tries, my MCAT & GPA proved I was just as capable as any of my classmates would be, and I absolutely deserved to be there.

The first portion of the semester went as expected. I had my morning routine, I took the ferry to campus, I studied Anki flashcards, and wrote notes in PDFs of my lectures. I was doing everything I was told to do in order to do well in medical school. But then, I took a practice midterm and oh boy was I screwed.

To give you some context, my clinical sciences course only has 3 exams per semester: the midterm (25% of my grade), the spotter (25%) and the final (50%). So, as you can see, there is very little room to mess up on any exam.

But after that terrible practice exam, all hell broke loose.

I vlogged the week leading up to first mid-semester exam if you want to see me break down slowly but let me tell you, my first couple weeks in quarantine were not fun at all.

I failed my first midterm.

Like failed-failed. Not a cute "Oh I did below what I wanted" or even "Wow the class average was higher than me, how embarrassing." No, I properly failed that exam.

I was discouraged but determined to turn it around. Now that I knew what a real exam looked like, my study methods needed to be adjusted.

The good news is, while the mid-semester exam was a quarter of my final grade, as long as I did well on the other 2 exams, I still had 75% of my grade that was unaccounted for.

I cracked down, made a study plan, and got to work but a few weeks later, the world got a little worse.

TW: Depression

For my own mental health and probably yours too, I'm not going to recount the events of early 2020 in detail more than to say I have deeply mourned the loss of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. As rough as the last year was, the worst moment by far was watching the last 8 minute and 46 seconds of George Floyd's life.

For several months the combination of me struggling in school and the lack of hope I felt for the state of the world led me into a state of depression. For months, I just didn't feel like myself. I felt like my joy had been stolen. I cried more in those few months than I think I have in my entire life. When I would study, information simply would not stick in my brain. I felt like I could have learned the same amount of information staring at a blank wall all day that I did combing over my notes for hours and attempting to regurgitate the information.

On top of everything, I missed community more than ever. I was almost 10,000 miles from everyone I loved and on top of that, in my class of 500 students only 5 of us have any type of African decent and only 2 of us identify as African-American.

Between living abroad, quarantine, #blacklivesmatter protests, and missing my mama's cooking, my brain had just run out of room for the renin-aldosterone system.

All I did for the month leading up to the exam was eat, sleep, and study (and those first 2 are questionable) and I somehow still couldn't answer practice questions.

Even though I was doing everything I could, I did not pass my final exams either.

The one good thing I will say about that time is "peace that surpasses all understanding" is very, very real. In a season where I had no joy and no reason for joy, God gave me the gift of peace when I had every reason to be anxious. At night, my eyes would blur but then I would be covered in an overwhelming sense of calm that I could have never conjured up if I tried. I would fall asleep before any tears could fall.

That unshakable peace is the only explanation I have for what happened next.

While I did not pass my first semester immediately, my final grade was close enough to the pass mark that my school allowed me to sit a cumulative exam for the semester. If I passed that exam, it would supplement my previous grade and I would be able move on to the next semester with my class.

The two weeks I had to prepare for the supplemental exam are all a blur for me. I have no idea how I learned 16 weeks of information (for what might as well have been the first time) and I'm sure that experience is going to come back to bite me when I have to recount that information again for my board exams. But all that mattered then was that I had passed the supplemental exam and was free to continue on to the next semester.

The struggles of medical school definitely didn't end there. In fact, by the time I completed my supplemental exam, I was several weeks behind for the next semester and had enrolled in some much needed therapy to go along with my medical school courses. However, I think this battle is an important one to celebrate while the war is still raging on.

Over a year ago, I shared the testimony of how God got me into medical school. I think there's a very real temptation to brag on God once we have accomplished something but while we are struggling, we can shut down and not talk about God at all. We celebrate the prize but we neglect to celebrate the peace that carried us to the finish line.

Whatever season you may be in, I hope my testimony will encourage you that no matter how rough it may get out in these streets, there is a God who is offering you unimaginable peace, whenever you would like to accept it.

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"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." Phil 4:6-7